On it being easy when you know how

So I fought for a couple of hours (on and off) trying to get my Ultra5 to netboot Debian from one of my VMs. After navigating through rarpd (deprecated on Linux kernels 2.3+, usurped by userland) and tftpd (again, deprecated and replaced by tftpd-hpa), I was seeing tftp requests coming from the Ultra5 with this weird octect string in it. That lead me to the lazyweb where I found this snippet:

Next, prepare the tftp server to serve up the boot image. Download the sun4u tftpboot.img (for Woody) or sparc64 boot.img (for Sarge) from your local Debian mirror, and put it in your tftp directory (look at the tftp entry in /etc/inetd.conf to see where that is). It should be named (or symlinked to) the capitalized hex representation of the IP address specified by rarpd -- here, it'd be C0A80304. If you don't feel like doing conversions, just let it boot and watch the log to see what filename it asks for, as here:

May 22 01:23:04 kesha in.tftpd[14066]: connect from 192.168.3.4
May 22 01:23:04 kesha tftpd[14067]: tftpd: trying to get file: C0A80304
May 22 01:23:04 kesha tftpd[14067]: tftpd: serving file from /var/local/tftp

Sonofabbb[deleted]. Which lead me down a whole raft of content where it was plainly evident that I should have researched that right from the start and I would have been done a whole lot quicker.